IN PARK CHAN-WOOK’S DECISION TO LEAVE, A DETECTIVE FALLS IN LOVE WITH A MURDER SUSPECT. WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE, THE DIRECTOR EXPLAINS WHY HE’S DIALLED BACK THE DEVIANCE TO MAKE AN INTIMATE ROMANCE…

WORDS PARK CHAN-WOOK

Murder suspect Seo-rae (Tang Wei) with detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il)

FUNNILY ENOUGH, THE DECISION TO MAKE DECISION TO LEAVE, which in some respects is the most Korean of all my films, was made in London. This was in August 2018, when I was in post-production on The Little Drummer Girl for the BBC. My screenwriting partner, Chung Seo-kyung, who has worked with me on the scripts for Lady Vengeance, I’m A Cyborg But That’s OK, Thirst and The Handmaiden, was in town on holiday.

The sudden arrival of an old friend from my homeland, at a time when I was overwhelmed by work, sparked my motivation. That is, to start on my next film. (I’m a little bit embarrassed by the fact that when I’m exhausted from work, my chosen means of recovery is not rest, but to take up new work.) And it helped the next project to take shape.

Looking back, it seems that each film I conceive is a kind of reaction to the previous film. After JSA, which explored the division of Korea into North and South, I was moved to make Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, about class issues within South Korea; the ‘cold’ Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance was followed by the ‘hot’ Oldboy; after the masculine Oldboy came the feminine Lady Vengeance, and so on.

In this way, The Little Drummer Girl was issuing me orders: not to fashion some kind of complicated drama about global politics, but to make the simplest of love stories. Even The Handmaiden’s plot had also been quite complicated. Now, I wanted simplicity.

WHEN I MET UP WITH SEO-KYUNG, there were three sources of inspiration that had already captured my attention. The first being the detective Martin Beck. He’s the lead character in a series of ten novels by the Swedish couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and for many years, only the most famous book among them, The Laughing Policeman, was available in Korean translation. After coming across it as an adolescent I had always wanted to read the other books, and in 2017 I was overjoyed when the entire series began to be translated and published. I savoured them book by book, page by page, like sweet chocolate melting on my tongue.